Digital music store

The first free, high-fidelity online music archive of downloadable songs on the Internet was the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA),[1] which was started by Rob Lord, Jeff Patterson and Jon Luini from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.

The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio.

In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until Rhapsody acquired it from Best Buy[5] on 1 December 2011.

Later companies and projects successfully followed its P2P file sharing example such as Gnutella, Freenet, Kazaa, Bearshare, and many others.

Some services, like LimeWire, Scour, Grokster, Madster, and eDonkey2000, were brought down or changed due to similar circumstances.

In 2000, Factory Records entrepreneur Tony Wilson and his business partners launched an early online music store, Music33, which sold MP3s for 33 pence per song.

Furthermore, as MP3 Newswire pointed out in its review of the service, users were actually only renting the tracks for that $3.50, because the patron did not own the audio file.

Again, both services struggled, hampered by high prices and heavy limitations on how downloaded files could be used once paid for.

The demand for digital audio downloading skyrocketed after the launch of Apple's iTunes Store (then called iTunes Music Store) in April 2003 and the creation of portable music and digital audio players such as the iPod.

An increasing number of new services appeared in the 2000s that enabled musicians to sell their music directly to fans without an intermediary.

The iTunes platform has been the main reason for this shift, as it originally sold every song in its library for 99 cents.

[12][13] Instant grats have also been offered on other online music stores including Amazon and Spotify.